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The Truth About GDP Growth Many conservatives claim that America's economic model is vastly superior to Europe's, and cite poor economic growth and higher unemployment in Europe to back their claim. This usually leads to a whole line of argument about how business-friendly the American system is. Then there is the line about the need to continue cutting taxes and pushing deregulation to keep our economy humming along. All a very interesting story, which would potentially be salient if it were not built on sand. A closer look at the numbers shows that it is not so much that the US economy is growing faster than Europe's economy, but that our population is growing faster. Hardly an encouraging trend given the crumbling state of our infrastructure, and our continuing inability to manage sustainable population growth. As to unemployment, I have yet to see any solid methodology to allow for comparisons between American and European unemployment rates, but many economists believe that our unemployment is close to the 10-12% we belittle the Europeans for maintaining. That's right, despite the higher taxation, government funded safety net, regulation, etc., European economies are actually just as healthy as ours. And it is hard to imagine that anyone would choose long-term unemployment in the US over long-term unemployment in Europe. Or, for that matter, bottom-of-the-wage-scale employment. If the conservatives are correct, and our economy would tank if we had European levels of taxation and regulation, Then we are doing something really wrong. If our economy would continue to chug along with that higher taxation and regulation, then it is reprehensible that we are slashing government services to the poor and middle class and trashing our environment just to enrich our richest citizens. So which is it: our economic model sucks and it is only low taxation and deregulation that allows us to be in the same league as the Europeans; or is it the case that all of those tax cuts and deregulation efforts really are just screwing regular citizens to make the rich richer?